Of the frontline Founding Fathers, we New Yorkers claim Alexander
Hamilton. Yet, though he appears on
the $10 bill, Hamilton remains far less known than Washington,
Jefferson, Adams, or Franklin. The Catholic
and public schools I attended in Chicago in the 1960s taught
me all about the
Virginians and the Adamses of Massachusetts. Not until college,
when I read "The Federalist Papers," did I
really come to know Hamilton. Perhaps that's how it ought
to be for the man of whom the British historian
Paul Johnson wrote: "Hamilton was a genius - the only
one of the Founding Fathers fully entitled to that
accolade."

Hamiltoniana abounds in New York. Yet none of it is on the
tourist itinerary. Imagine going to Philadelphia
and leaving unaware of Franklin. Yet 99.9% of visitors to
New York never even think of Hamilton while they
are here. They do not make a beeline for Hamilton's grave
in Trinity Churchyard, nor do they travel uptown
to his home, Hamilton Grange, on Convent Avenue.

Against this background, the New-York Historical Society is
offering a splendid exhibition called "Alexander
Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America," organized
by Richard Brookhiser, James Basker, and Mina
Rieur Weiner, and designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates.
As the society endeavors to broaden its mission
from New York history to national history, it's hard to think
of a better subject than Hamilton, who, I am
inclined, after seeing this exhibit, to think was the most
important of the Founding Fathers.

Why all the attention to Hamilton now? (Ron Chernow's important
biography was also published this spring).
This year is the 200th anniversary of Hamilton's death. He
died, as most people know, soon after being shot
in a duel with the vice president, Aaron Burr. In a marvelous
bit of serendipity, 1804 was also the year of the
founding of the New-York Historical Society. That's relevant,
because much (though by no means all) of the
material in the exhibit comes from the society's incredibly
rich collections.

Outside the first of the three main galleries of the exhibit
are a pair of new bronze statues by the Santa Febased
sculptor Kim Crowley. One is of Hamilton, the other of Burr.
They face each other, pistols drawn, in an
unexpected tableau of the duel. In a display case on the wall
behind the figures we find the actual dueling
pistols that they used. Interestingly, these pistols come
from the collection of JPMorgan Chase. Interesting because
Chase Manhattan Bank evolved out of the Bank of the Manhattan
Company, founded by Aaron Burr
in 1799 as a competitor to Hamilton's Bank of New York.

The duel sets the stage for the society's stupendous overview
of Hamilton's life and career. The first gallery
contains portrait paintings of people Hamilton knew - friends,
colleagues, and enemies. It's an amazing
assemblage. John Vanderlyn's portraits of Burr and of his
remarkable daughter Theodosia, Gilbert Stuart's
Robert Livingston, Joseph Wright's John Jay, Rembrandt Peale's
portraits of George and Martha Washington,
Ralph Earl's Elizabeth Schuyler (Mrs. Alexander) Hamilton,
and much more - these alone are worth the
price of admission.

The next gallery presents the meat of the exhibit. Here along
one wall are display cases devoted each to a
different facet of the life and career of Hamilton - his youth,
his military career, his law career, his career as
an economist, his life as an "activist" (including
an 1801 manuscript letter to Jefferson from Burr, accusing
Hamilton of being "mad with spleen and envy"), and
his role as a "futurist." (The "Economist"
case features a
backdrop of the estimable Francis Guy's oil painting [c. 1800]
of the Tontine Coffee House on Wall and Water
Streets. When will someone mount an exhibit of Guy's marvelous
topographical paintings?)

On the wall opposite, screens run films pertaining to Hamilton
and his influence. The gallery also has several
freestanding display cases. These - as do the categorized
wall cases - feature a breathtaking selection of
historical documents, mementos, and pictures. The history
buff will swoon as he gazes upon such treasures
as Hamilton's handwritten notes for the 1784 case of Rutgers
v. Waddington, or Rufus King's handwritten
notes on Hamilton's speech at the Constitutional Convention
in 1787. It's always a bit of a shock to look at
such things, for it is amazing that they exist at all; and
they do cast an aura.

A final gallery - a corridor, actually, leading us into the
gift shop - contains a carefully constructed timeline of
Hamilton's life.

In recent years, much not previously known, or known for fact,
about Hamilton's life has been nailed down
with certainty by historians and biographers. For example,
the exhibit tells us that Hamilton was born in
1757. The current edition of Oxford's American National Biography
still renders his birth year as "1757?." He
had, as Edith Wharton might have written, "murky antecedents."
This exhibit (together with some recent
books such as Richard Brookhiser's and Ron Chernow's) dispels
the old myth of Hamilton's half-Jewish
parentage. Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was the illegitimate
son of a Scotsman, James Hamilton, and
Rachel Lavien, a Huguenot. Yet some biographies report her
as Rachel Levine, a Jew. This background gave
rise among Hamilton's enemies to such innuendoes as that he
was a Creole or a Jew. One almost wishes he
had been, just so we could say, "so what?"

During the Republican Convention I led a walking tour on political
history in New York. One of my guests was
a young Englishman of anarchistic per suasion. He asked me
why I thought the United States, since its
founding, had never experienced a political revolution. Since
he had earlier asked me why New York had so
many statues of "dead white males who raped and pillaged
the land," I presumed he wanted me to say that
our political placidity resulted from "corporate brainwashing"
or "manufactured consent." The only pithy
answer that I could come up with was that we have a good Constitution.
This is true. But I might just as well
have answered: "because of Alexander Hamilton."
The least romantic of the Founders was also the one
who placed the new nation on a sound footing - philosophically
and financially. I do not know that if I were
alive in Hamilton's day I would have liked him, or supported
all his policies, but I do think the historical
society's title gets it right: He was the man who made modern
America.

Thanks to this wonderful exhibition, many more people will
think this as well.